Actually, the pine tree in a lung... that was (obviously) a fake: http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/04/russian-man-did-not-aspirate-fir-tree.html
But if this pea actually did grow insidiously inside a man's lung, this is actually remarkable in any number of ways. The immune system surely could not handle a pea, it's simply too large. Plants of been around for a lot longer than mammals, and this just goes to show their evolutionary dominance. If you're an imaginative person, it brings to mind that M. Night Shyamalan movie about the plants intentionally releasing pollen that was toxic to humans. Twilight zone stuff.
A plant growing inside a human, able to cause pain and possibly death, much like a virus, brings to mind lots of philosophical questions.
What happened to the tilde (~), I thought that was pretty universal as sarcasm. But if you can't figure out when it's sarcasm, then the problems with you, not the comment.
I think it's QC, not R&D. An Apple store recently opened near me so I got to play with some iPhone4's for a while in the store, and I might go back because I found some interesting things. Two iPhone4's right next to each other, one dropped to 0 bars in the store within 30 seconds of merely touching the antenna gap, the other one dropped 2 bars after a couple minutes of death gripping it. There was NO discernable exterior difference in the phones. I even scratched at the metal to try to see any noticeable polyvinyl coating on one v the other. At that point, the third "Genius" in a matter of 90 seconds asked if I needed any help, so I began to feel awkward poking at the phone (it was very busy in the store).
I would not be surprised if one manufacturing plant in China has a poor Quality Control or Quality Assurance division that just is not doing their job. I've seen pictures of iPhones with reversed volume controls on the side, and this lends to that explanation, and to Apple's personal assurances that they've thoroughly tested these phones. A coating of some sort should be sufficient to abrogate any conductivity, and it does not make sense that Apple did not think of that. I might return and take a look at the batch numbers on the back of the iPhones I played with in the store. I'm still not buying one, because I have no idea if I'm going to get one that works or one that does not, and I'm not playing games with the return people. By the time they get it sorted out, if ever, the Next Big Thing will probably be out. I still own the original iPhone, because nothing has seemed worth the upgrade yet.
Yeah, but you don't go around telling the creator of the jigsaw puzzle that you put it together in a way they haven't described and that this might result in damages, but not if they just listen to what you have to say.
Motives be damned, as far as Microsoft knows, anyone that discovers a security vulnerability is a potential extortionist and they'll treat you that way.
What is it these people are looking for from Microsoft? Recognition that they found a vulnerability that anyone else could have found? Money or employment, maybe a resume booster? Why would anyone BOTHER to go looking for vulnerabilities in the largest operating system in the world for ALTRUISTIC reasons? It doesn't make sense. Did they expect anything other than being "spurned"? Honestly...
Toyota RAV4 EV's sell for more than their original MSRP 10 years ago right now on eBay. Residual value is a matter of supply and demand, this 'analyst' sounds like he wants to mess with the demand part.
Yes, storm chasers have the right to chase a storm, but they are blinded to the fact that they also have the RESPONSIBILITY to do so safely.
You have the right to go out into the street and start yelling racist stuff, but you'll probably get hurt badly if you do. Storm chasers have the right to be on the roads, but that doesn't mean they're not causing other people harm while doing so.
Anything that includes circuitry would be affected (destroyed) by magnetic storms from the sun. In 1859, telegraph wires visibly sparked across the United States due to a geomagnetic solar storm, the largest recorded in history. I just hope my phone in my pocket doesn't take my leg off.
Research is a noncommercial endeavour, and as such patent infringement cannot occur. What these "researchers" were trying to do with these brains was something akin to a commercial endeavour, whereby the can extract the stem cells within the dead children's brains, grow them as eternal cell culture and cell these renewing stem cell cultures to real researchers. If they were performing non-profit research, they could use whatever technique the wanted to... it's like a hobby.
You can go tinker with your car and fabricate a new intake manifold on your own to make it go faster, and not be afraid of being sued for patent infringement because you used some company's design for an intake manifold. When you start racing professionally with that car seeking sponsorships and purses, then you've committed patent infringement.
AT&T offers SMS/MMS/Data blocking on an account. In fact, it's even at online check-out on their webpage. It asks if you want to disable SMS, MMS, or Data from any line so that you won't get charged and won't receive any of those things. You can also opt to pay per use, or to buy a set amount or an "unlimited" amount. Can't miss it.
Also, the higher altitude regions, such as mountains, have higher electromagnetic energy due to being closer to the turbulent atmosphere. It's possible that this could result in hallucinations of all sorts, and explain the many mystic experiences of such regions.
For those that suffer from migraines, these lights and balls should be familiar as "aura", or scintilating scotoma. For migraineurs, these lights last longer because they are caused by changing bloodflow to the occipital lobe over a longer period of time. It most assuredly activates the same neurons that this magnetic stimulation of neurons produces.
I would not be surprised of reports of concomitant parosmia, or olfactory hallucinations, with the display of ball-lightning caused by magnetic fields.
Actually, the APOE4 allele that predisposes to Alzheimer's Disease / Dementia also embues its recipients with a higher IQ. The hypothesis is that the brain burns out quickly, so perhaps chess players do become progressively more illogical as they burn out their logic circuits quickly in earlier life.
Indeed, double bravo! Thanks for being rational. I'm also a scientist and I cannot stand the "flimsy house of cards" of climate change that is absolute taboo.
The simple fact that the Climate Researchers in TFA used incorrect statistical methods but "arrived at the correct results" is ludicrous. How can we postulate a "correct result" if the method is flawed? If your method is flawed, the experiment is meaningless. This is the same reasoning that Creationists use: "Here's the result we want, how can we make the pieces fit post-hoc?" If the methods are wrong, the results are not simply wrong, they are meaningless and you cannot extract "correct results" from them.
But of course, climate "scientists" do not do science, it's more akin to social studies. The idea that we, the most advanced species on the earth, have no effect on the climate is short-sighted. But no climate study I have encountered has any scientific method behind it to prove any specific causation. The term "science" is applied to anything that takes effort, planning, or nifty machines that print graphs; but that's not science. Science is like chess: you set up your pieces, or methods, so that the result is irrefutable: checkmate.
The real question you should have used as a rebuttal: does the GMU "video game designer" program give its students the opportunity to CREATE a RESULT that they can use to get hired? If so, golly. If not, it's a waste of time.
Education is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Just because you get a degree does not entitle you to the wonderful career of designing a video game for 60 hours a week while being paid peanuts.
I know a ton of people that would love to think they're getting an education by being taught "video game design". Just because they've taken a few tests doesn't mean they can create a good video game, and no employer is going to take a degree in the place of experience and results to show for it.
If you owned a video game studio, who would you publish? Some guy who sat on his ass and got a degree in "video game design" from some no-name school? Or some guy that programmed and released for free an innovative game over the internet? I'd take the guy that has results. The degree is not going to help you, showing an employer you know what you're doing through a tangible product will get you hired. Bring a disc or web address to an interview, not a piece of paper.
That's the free software developer's fault. They developed and released free software with the intention of it being free, not with the stipulation that if it is ever worth something that they should get a cut.
If those free software developers wanted to go through the process of patenting/copyrighting the software, investing millions in PUBLICIZING IT LIKE GOOGLE/ETC. do with it, and generally provide the support of a large corporation, then maybe they would get a cut of the software.
Software isn't just the code, it's the marketing and more importantly the support from the company AFTER SALE. Free software only works because there is no financial investment from the creators after the point of sale. They get the ability to put it on their resume and hope to get recognized so they can move on up. That's the difference between an IT person and a Business person. Don't blame the business person for taking the IT person's FREE SOFTWARE and providing the billion dollar industry of SUPPORT and MARKETING to back it up.
Armed Guards outside a complex is security through obscurity. The security is in hiding the information inside the complex by using armed guards to keep your adversary out. Wars are won and lost with information, not with guns or bases. This is the real world, not Starcraft.
Your chess analogy is interesting but flawed. Yes you can see all of the pieces, but what you cannot see is the information inside your opponent's mind. That information, that tactical quality, is what is going to defeat you, not the queen and the rook. Again, the battle is with information (knowledge and wisdom), not guns and steel.
I'm a neurobiologist, let me explain. The brain requires the nutrients in the blood to work properly and to maintain its network. Smoking causes atherosclerosis, hardening of the blood vessels, which allows less blood to flow into the brain, meaning less nutrients available for the most nutrient hungry organ in the body. Viz. you brain will have a lower capacity and a delayed response time. In the water-shed regions of the brain, between two arteries, these regions will receive decreasing levels of blood-nutrients, meaning those regions eventually die off. Some of the most critical watershed regions are in the dorsolateral frontal cortex, which is a critical functional area for working memory, basically the region that IQ measures, and executive function or the ability to make the best decision based on the information available.
Sure, there might also be a correlation that lower economic class individuals are more likely to be smokers and also more likely to be less educated. However, I know many high class individuals that smoke leisurely. Ever hear of cigars?
The right temporo-parietal lobe junction is well known as the language integration area. The article states these people had this region of their brain, known otherwise as Wernicke's area, altered by magnetic fields, and then READ A STORY and were asked to make a moral judgment on it. This sounds a lot more like auditory processing to me, and I'll give more reason. Individuals with an infarction in this region of the brain are classically unable to note emotional changes in individuals based on speech cues.
It seems most likely (Occam's Razor) to me, that these individuals had their auditory association areas monkeyed with, and ended up being less able to pick-up emotional cues in the reader's voice, which have remarkable amounts of data in regard to the transmission of information. To these people in the experiment, the reader might have sounded like a drab and boring reader, and to the controls the same reading may have been filled with emotional information. These emotional cues are powerful motivators to come to a consensus opinion even among people of disparate moral backgrounds.
I did not read any more of the article than that, it is feasible to control for some of these aspects or to use a different experimental design to confirm the hypothesis, but I would be very careful in claiming that this is some sort of moral core of the brain. It's also been shown that magnetic fields caused agitation, and agitated people are less likely to be compassionate. I suffer from relatively constant pain from migraines and some other things, and I know most people think I'm a jerk when they first encounter me, but I am just less tolerant of people complaining (I'm actually fairly empathic and empathetic, which makes it even worse to have lousy people near me).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the pine tree in a lung ... that was (obviously) a fake: http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/04/russian-man-did-not-aspirate-fir-tree.html
But if this pea actually did grow insidiously inside a man's lung, this is actually remarkable in any number of ways. The immune system surely could not handle a pea, it's simply too large. Plants of been around for a lot longer than mammals, and this just goes to show their evolutionary dominance. If you're an imaginative person, it brings to mind that M. Night Shyamalan movie about the plants intentionally releasing pollen that was toxic to humans. Twilight zone stuff.
A plant growing inside a human, able to cause pain and possibly death, much like a virus, brings to mind lots of philosophical questions.
What happened to the tilde (~), I thought that was pretty universal as sarcasm.
But if you can't figure out when it's sarcasm, then the problems with you, not the comment.
I think it's QC, not R&D. An Apple store recently opened near me so I got to play with some iPhone4's for a while in the store, and I might go back because I found some interesting things. Two iPhone4's right next to each other, one dropped to 0 bars in the store within 30 seconds of merely touching the antenna gap, the other one dropped 2 bars after a couple minutes of death gripping it. There was NO discernable exterior difference in the phones. I even scratched at the metal to try to see any noticeable polyvinyl coating on one v the other. At that point, the third "Genius" in a matter of 90 seconds asked if I needed any help, so I began to feel awkward poking at the phone (it was very busy in the store).
I would not be surprised if one manufacturing plant in China has a poor Quality Control or Quality Assurance division that just is not doing their job. I've seen pictures of iPhones with reversed volume controls on the side, and this lends to that explanation, and to Apple's personal assurances that they've thoroughly tested these phones. A coating of some sort should be sufficient to abrogate any conductivity, and it does not make sense that Apple did not think of that. I might return and take a look at the batch numbers on the back of the iPhones I played with in the store. I'm still not buying one, because I have no idea if I'm going to get one that works or one that does not, and I'm not playing games with the return people. By the time they get it sorted out, if ever, the Next Big Thing will probably be out. I still own the original iPhone, because nothing has seemed worth the upgrade yet.
mod parent Informative
Yeah, but you don't go around telling the creator of the jigsaw puzzle that you put it together in a way they haven't described and that this might result in damages, but not if they just listen to what you have to say.
Motives be damned, as far as Microsoft knows, anyone that discovers a security vulnerability is a potential extortionist and they'll treat you that way.
...
What is it these people are looking for from Microsoft? Recognition that they found a vulnerability that anyone else could have found? Money or employment, maybe a resume booster? Why would anyone BOTHER to go looking for vulnerabilities in the largest operating system in the world for ALTRUISTIC reasons? It doesn't make sense. Did they expect anything other than being "spurned"? Honestly
Toyota RAV4 EV's sell for more than their original MSRP 10 years ago right now on eBay. Residual value is a matter of supply and demand, this 'analyst' sounds like he wants to mess with the demand part.
Except you can opt out at http://oo.apple.com/ on your iOS4 Device.
Had no idea the sun paid that exorbitant licensing fee! I guess we'll need a bigger telescope to see the THX sticker.
Yes, storm chasers have the right to chase a storm, but they are blinded to the fact that they also have the RESPONSIBILITY to do so safely.
You have the right to go out into the street and start yelling racist stuff, but you'll probably get hurt badly if you do. Storm chasers have the right to be on the roads, but that doesn't mean they're not causing other people harm while doing so.
Anything that includes circuitry would be affected (destroyed) by magnetic storms from the sun. In 1859, telegraph wires visibly sparked across the United States due to a geomagnetic solar storm, the largest recorded in history. I just hope my phone in my pocket doesn't take my leg off.
Indeed, apologies: bad migraine.
*cell=sell ... too many synonyms :-/ ..."
"...and sell these renewing stem
Research is a noncommercial endeavour, and as such patent infringement cannot occur. What these "researchers" were trying to do with these brains was something akin to a commercial endeavour, whereby the can extract the stem cells within the dead children's brains, grow them as eternal cell culture and cell these renewing stem cell cultures to real researchers. If they were performing non-profit research, they could use whatever technique the wanted to ... it's like a hobby.
You can go tinker with your car and fabricate a new intake manifold on your own to make it go faster, and not be afraid of being sued for patent infringement because you used some company's design for an intake manifold. When you start racing professionally with that car seeking sponsorships and purses, then you've committed patent infringement.
AT&T offers SMS/MMS/Data blocking on an account. In fact, it's even at online check-out on their webpage. It asks if you want to disable SMS, MMS, or Data from any line so that you won't get charged and won't receive any of those things. You can also opt to pay per use, or to buy a set amount or an "unlimited" amount. Can't miss it.
Also, the higher altitude regions, such as mountains, have higher electromagnetic energy due to being closer to the turbulent atmosphere. It's possible that this could result in hallucinations of all sorts, and explain the many mystic experiences of such regions.
For those that suffer from migraines, these lights and balls should be familiar as "aura", or scintilating scotoma. For migraineurs, these lights last longer because they are caused by changing bloodflow to the occipital lobe over a longer period of time. It most assuredly activates the same neurons that this magnetic stimulation of neurons produces. I would not be surprised of reports of concomitant parosmia, or olfactory hallucinations, with the display of ball-lightning caused by magnetic fields.
Actually, the APOE4 allele that predisposes to Alzheimer's Disease / Dementia also embues its recipients with a higher IQ. The hypothesis is that the brain burns out quickly, so perhaps chess players do become progressively more illogical as they burn out their logic circuits quickly in earlier life.
Indeed, double bravo! Thanks for being rational. I'm also a scientist and I cannot stand the "flimsy house of cards" of climate change that is absolute taboo.
The simple fact that the Climate Researchers in TFA used incorrect statistical methods but "arrived at the correct results" is ludicrous. How can we postulate a "correct result" if the method is flawed? If your method is flawed, the experiment is meaningless. This is the same reasoning that Creationists use: "Here's the result we want, how can we make the pieces fit post-hoc?" If the methods are wrong, the results are not simply wrong, they are meaningless and you cannot extract "correct results" from them.
But of course, climate "scientists" do not do science, it's more akin to social studies. The idea that we, the most advanced species on the earth, have no effect on the climate is short-sighted. But no climate study I have encountered has any scientific method behind it to prove any specific causation. The term "science" is applied to anything that takes effort, planning, or nifty machines that print graphs; but that's not science. Science is like chess: you set up your pieces, or methods, so that the result is irrefutable: checkmate.
The real question you should have used as a rebuttal: does the GMU "video game designer" program give its students the opportunity to CREATE a RESULT that they can use to get hired? If so, golly. If not, it's a waste of time.
Education is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Just because you get a degree does not entitle you to the wonderful career of designing a video game for 60 hours a week while being paid peanuts.
I know a ton of people that would love to think they're getting an education by being taught "video game design". Just because they've taken a few tests doesn't mean they can create a good video game, and no employer is going to take a degree in the place of experience and results to show for it.
If you owned a video game studio, who would you publish? Some guy who sat on his ass and got a degree in "video game design" from some no-name school? Or some guy that programmed and released for free an innovative game over the internet? I'd take the guy that has results. The degree is not going to help you, showing an employer you know what you're doing through a tangible product will get you hired. Bring a disc or web address to an interview, not a piece of paper.
That's the free software developer's fault. They developed and released free software with the intention of it being free, not with the stipulation that if it is ever worth something that they should get a cut.
If those free software developers wanted to go through the process of patenting/copyrighting the software, investing millions in PUBLICIZING IT LIKE GOOGLE/ETC. do with it, and generally provide the support of a large corporation, then maybe they would get a cut of the software.
Software isn't just the code, it's the marketing and more importantly the support from the company AFTER SALE. Free software only works because there is no financial investment from the creators after the point of sale. They get the ability to put it on their resume and hope to get recognized so they can move on up. That's the difference between an IT person and a Business person. Don't blame the business person for taking the IT person's FREE SOFTWARE and providing the billion dollar industry of SUPPORT and MARKETING to back it up.
Armed Guards outside a complex is security through obscurity. The security is in hiding the information inside the complex by using armed guards to keep your adversary out. Wars are won and lost with information, not with guns or bases. This is the real world, not Starcraft.
Your chess analogy is interesting but flawed. Yes you can see all of the pieces, but what you cannot see is the information inside your opponent's mind. That information, that tactical quality, is what is going to defeat you, not the queen and the rook. Again, the battle is with information (knowledge and wisdom), not guns and steel.
I'm a neurobiologist, let me explain. The brain requires the nutrients in the blood to work properly and to maintain its network. Smoking causes atherosclerosis, hardening of the blood vessels, which allows less blood to flow into the brain, meaning less nutrients available for the most nutrient hungry organ in the body. Viz. you brain will have a lower capacity and a delayed response time. In the water-shed regions of the brain, between two arteries, these regions will receive decreasing levels of blood-nutrients, meaning those regions eventually die off. Some of the most critical watershed regions are in the dorsolateral frontal cortex, which is a critical functional area for working memory, basically the region that IQ measures, and executive function or the ability to make the best decision based on the information available.
Sure, there might also be a correlation that lower economic class individuals are more likely to be smokers and also more likely to be less educated. However, I know many high class individuals that smoke leisurely. Ever hear of cigars?
The right temporo-parietal lobe junction is well known as the language integration area. The article states these people had this region of their brain, known otherwise as Wernicke's area, altered by magnetic fields, and then READ A STORY and were asked to make a moral judgment on it. This sounds a lot more like auditory processing to me, and I'll give more reason. Individuals with an infarction in this region of the brain are classically unable to note emotional changes in individuals based on speech cues.
It seems most likely (Occam's Razor) to me, that these individuals had their auditory association areas monkeyed with, and ended up being less able to pick-up emotional cues in the reader's voice, which have remarkable amounts of data in regard to the transmission of information. To these people in the experiment, the reader might have sounded like a drab and boring reader, and to the controls the same reading may have been filled with emotional information. These emotional cues are powerful motivators to come to a consensus opinion even among people of disparate moral backgrounds.
I did not read any more of the article than that, it is feasible to control for some of these aspects or to use a different experimental design to confirm the hypothesis, but I would be very careful in claiming that this is some sort of moral core of the brain. It's also been shown that magnetic fields caused agitation, and agitated people are less likely to be compassionate. I suffer from relatively constant pain from migraines and some other things, and I know most people think I'm a jerk when they first encounter me, but I am just less tolerant of people complaining (I'm actually fairly empathic and empathetic, which makes it even worse to have lousy people near me).